This post provides information on creating Linux VMs in Azure and using tools like Chef, Puppet and Docker for managing Linux VMs. Microsoft Virtual Academy hosted the Azure IaaS for IT Pros web streaming event from Dec 1st – 4th , geared towards IT professionals working with Azure. The topics covered in this event were intended to provide detailed information on various Azure Infrastructure as a Service components. In this blog post I would to highlight the Linux and OSS topics covered in day 3 of the event. These hour long sessions focus on providing information on what’s available in Azure for Linux and the tools to deploy them, including supporting large scale Linux deployments, containers in Azure and managing VM deployments Azure using Chef, Puppet and other standard tools.

Getting started with Linux Support on Azure

We get started with an overview session on deploying Linux/OSS workloads on Azure, the options you have in terms of VM images (curated as well as community),VM extensions and finally support for different application language frameworks like Java, Python, PHP etc., Regardless of whether you are using cloud for Dev/test or lifting and shifting existing OSS applications to cloud, this session will help you get started. Presenter: Madhan Arumugam Ramakrishnan

Configuration Management of Linux VMs:

Next we move on to configuration management of the Virtual Machines and discuss how to use Chef and Puppet on Azure. Topics covered include using Knife, Puppet commands and/or Azure CLI to create and manage infrastructure in Azure and bootstrap the agents which are ready to be managed by Chef and Puppet. We also look at how to use standard scripting languages like ruby, python to deploy applications on Azure Presenter: Kundana Palagiri

Using Containers for running distributed Applications:

The third session gets into to the details of how to take advantage of container technology to manage and run distributed IT applications on Microsoft Azure using Docker ecosystem.Topics covered include setting up a Linux Docker host on Azure VM, interfacing with Docker Hub to pull and push user container images and automating the Docker images’ creation by using dockerfile and build process. Presenter: Khalid Mouss and Ahmet Alp Balkan

Creating large scale Linux deployments on Azure:

The final session in the series was on large scale Linux deployment.This includes how to approach the problem, key considerations to make, and also best practices on how to create large deployments in Azure. The sessions also shows examples of scripting to make deployments easier and provide a demo of how to scale out your data tier leveraging replication and the Azure Load Balancer. Presenter: Sung Hsueh That sums up the ‘Linux on Azure’ overview. I hope you find these sessions useful to manage your Linux VMs on Azure. Please let us know if there are any such topics you’d like to cover us in detail in future sessions.